Listening1
Sina Ashrafi 'Listening ' ' ' Up to the end of the 1960s, the status of listening comprehension in language Learning and teaching was one of neglect, these environmentalist considerations about learning to listen resulted In the Audio-lingual teaching methodology. This instructional approach emphasized the practice of listening by engaging learners in a series of exercises that focused on pronunciation drills, memorization of prefabricated patterns and imitation of dialogues (Morley 1999, 2001). By the late 1960s, the status of listening changed from being considered just a merely mechanical process of habit formation to a more dynamic and mentalist process. As a result of this primacy of listening, listeners’ role also changed from merely recognizing sounds to actively participating in the comprehension process through the use of mental strategies that were necessary for them to understand what they were listening to. These instructional approaches highlighted the explicit role of listening as a critical element for language learning and claimed that reception should precede production (Peterson 2001). The main proponent of such methodologies was Asher (1969), who proposed the pedagogical system Total Physical Response. This approach was based on the belief that once learners had been exposed to an extended period of listening. Some years later Krashen and Terrell (1983) developed the Natural Approach, which set a natural order of language acquisition by making learners listen to the language first and then involving them in a production phase next. By the late 1970s, the role of listening assumed greater importance due to significant shifts in a variety of research fields that shaped the interactionism approach to language learning. Listeners’ role changed from merely paying attention to the formal structures being heard toward listening for content and meaning (Rost 2001). Additionally, the influence of listeners’ prior background knowledge in the listening comprehension act was also considered. This aspect was indeed the key feature of the schema theory developed during the 1980s. The schema theory proposed by Rumelhart (1980), which was of paramount importance in reading comprehension (see Usó-Juan and Martínez- Flor’s chapter on reading in this volume), was also extended to the listening skill. This theory involves the collection of prior knowledge (i.e., schemata) and experience that is stored in listeners’ memory and assists the process of comprehension. Schemata can be of two types: content schemata and formal schemata (Lynch and Mendelsohn 2002; Lynch this volume). The former includes topic familiarity, cultural knowledge and previous experience with a particular field. Thus, if listeners are familiar with the given topic they are listening to, their content schemata can be activated and, consequently, comprehension becomes much easier. Apart from the influence of all these psycholinguistic aspects and processes involved in facilitating listening, by the 1980s and 1990s social and cultural aspects were also claimed to play an important role in the listening comprehension act. As a result of all previous assumptions underlying an interactionism view of learning to listen, the trend in language teaching has been to adopt a Task-Based or Interactive approach to listening (Morley 2001; In the Interactive approach to listening, learners follow a decoding, critical-thinking, speaking model in which they have to first decode the information they hear, react to it by processing it critically, and finally produce an appropriate response. Integrating listening within the communicative competence framework 1. Discourse competence: Discourse competence implies an understanding of how language operates at a level above the Linguistic competence sentence. 2. Linguistic competence : Linguistic competence includes all the elements of the linguistic system such as aspects concerning grammar, phonology and vocabulary (Celce Murcia and Olshtain 2000) 3. Pragmatic competence: Pragmatic competence involves an understanding of the function or illocutionary force of a spoken utterance in a given situation, as well as the socio pragmatic factors necessary to recognize not just what that utterance says, in linguistic terms, but also what it is meant by it. 4. Intercultural competence: Intercultural competence implies having knowledge of both cultural and non-verbal communicative factors in order to appropriately interpret given spoken text. refrence: Current ,trends in teaching second language skills Chastian,K .Developing Second-Language Skills